A convenient place for me to unload scoops of metaphorical brain matter.
The title refers to a book of poetry by Charles Bukowski.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

2010 Yearend List: Jams of the Year

This is the first year I've attempted to do any kind of yearend summary/critique of "best" or "favorite" albums/songs/concerts etc. etc. etc. It usually seemed like a silly idea to me. I mean, songs don't really care whether they were "released" into the public before or after some arbitrary calendar cutoff, you know? But whatever, we human beings like to categorize and organize and find order in chaos, and we sure as hell love to debate. So I tried making a list of favorite songs that I listened to a lot this year. In the process, I realized I was grossly underprepared for this task: I could think of a few off the top of my head, but mostly because they came from the top albums I listened to this year, but I wanted this list to encompass singles that don't necessarily come from great albums; also, I must not really pay attention to when music is released because I had to check on a lot of stuff and a good portion of it was from 2009; I also skimmed through my record collection to find some that wouldn't get picked up by Banshee's playcount ranking, and scanned some other folks' yearend album lists to scour for other ideas that slipped through the cracks of my mind. Basically, in the future, I need to keep these lists going all year and then weed out the shit later on. That's much easier than trying to build a big list from scratch at the end.

So anyway, here's a long list of songs I really liked this year. They're in alphabetical order by artist name, so there's no inherent ranking to the list. I'll likely add some more stuff over the next couple of weeks as they continue to come to mind, so keep an eye out for that. The "listen" link after each one will take you to a YouTube video or place to download/stream an mp3 file, depending on what I could find. Enjoy!